Speakers

About the presenters [in order of appearance]

Juan Enriquez is all about ideas, and all about the business opportunities of the future. He is an expert on why the life science revolution matters to business—and how to turn it to your advantage. An author, executive, and academician, Enriquez is an active investor in early-stage life sciences companies, and a managing director of Excel Venture Management. He is founder, chairman, and CEO of Biotechonomy, a life sciences research and investment firm. Enriquez was the founding director of Harvard Business School’s Life Science Project. He was part of a world discovery voyage led by Craig Venter (who sequenced the human genome), a multi-stage sailing voyage that sampled microbial genomes throughout the world’s oceans. (Fortune magazine profiled him as Mr. Gene and Time magazine asked him to co-organize the life sciences summit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA.) Enriquez is the author of As The Future Catches You, and was recognized by Harvard Business Review in its first Breakthrough Ideas list; by Fast Company magazine as a Fast 50 member; and by Seed as one of 50 persons with ideas that “shaped our identity, our culture, and the world as we know it.”

Jeremy Gutsche, an innovation expert, is the author of Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change [www.exploitingchaos.com], which was voted number-one most-popular business book at CEO Read. Gutsche is host of Trend Hunter TV [www.trendhunter.com/tv], and founder of TrendHunter.com, the world's largest network for trend spotting and innovation. He has written several thousand articles and has overseen the publication of 40,000+ trends for an audience of nearly 10 million monthly views. Routinely sourced by the media, Gutsche’s viewpoints have been featured in publications such as the Economist and the Financial Times, and on Entertainment Tonight. He has been described as "a new breed of trend spotter" by The Guardian, "an eagle eye" by Global TV, an "oracle" by the Globe and Mail, and "on the forefront of cool" by MTV. Gutsche’s recent book was named one of Inc Magazine’s Best Books for Business Owners, one of CEO Read's Books to Watch in 2009, and has been featured in BusinessWeek,Fast Company, BNN, Metro, CityTV, CBC, The Toronto Star, The National Post, the Chicago Tribune, and on countless blogs and tweets. Jeremy Gutsche's text is about powerful ideas and vivid stories that will help you stimulate creativity, identify opportunity, and ultimately, Exploit Chaos.

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is the co-author of the book Switch: How to Changes Things When Change is Hard, released in February, 2010, and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, which has been a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller. He is also a columnist for Fast Company magazine, and he has spoken and consulted to organizations such as Nike, the Nature Conservancy, Microsoft, Ideo, and the American Heart Association. Heath has taught courses on organizational behavior, negotiation, strategy, and international strategy. Prior to joining Stanford, Heath taught at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He received his B.S. in industrial engineering from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford. In their new book Switch, Heath and his co-author brother Dan Heath combine psychology, sociology, management, and case studies in an engaging narrative about the difficulty of bringing about genuine, lasting change—in ourselves, in others, and in our organizations—with success stories of significant results.

Bruce A. Ford is senior vice president of sales for Lodging Econometrics (LE), the industry authority for hotel real estate. Launched in 1995, LE is the recognized authority on all hotel real estate including the development pipeline and the sale and transfer of lodging real estate nationwide. LE also compiles and maintains the Industry’s Census of Open and Operating Hotels including the names of owners and management for more than 60,000 hotels in the U.S. and Canada. LE monitors the 50 states and 162 markets across the country, gathering the details of all lodging real estate activity from public domain sources. Ford has worked in the hospitality industry for nearly a decade and is responsible for the growth of LE as a nationally recognized source of hotel development and hotel real estate sales information. He serves on the Allied Member Executive Committee within the American Hotel & Lodging Association.

Paul Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Editor-In-Chief of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research. Peterson is a former director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and of the Governmental Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He received his Ph. D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Foundation, and the Center for Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning (Harvard University Press, 2010) and dozens of books and articles.

Peter Sheahan has spent a decade teaching businesses how to flip their thinking and find opportunity where others cannot. In addition to authoring six books, including the bestsellers Generation Y and Flip, Sheahan has established himself as a successful entrepreneur with an international thought-leadership practice and as the CEO of the Centre for Skills Development (CSD). The CSD specializes in large-scale social change projects for clients such as Apple and IBM. In addition to being a regular media commentator on Fox Business and Fox News, Sheahan has been a featured expert on innovation for CNBC. His work has been covered by ABC, Fast Company, Newsweek, and the Washington Post. He currently writes a monthly column for Convene Magazine in the U.S., and blogs for Fairfax (Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and the West Australian). He is the co-founder of Future at work, a highly specialized employment branding agency. It is a partnership between Sheahan and leading brand specialist Penny Burke, who have worked together on campaigns for clients including Newscorp, Borders, Toys’R’us, and the Australian Defence Force.

Richard Farson, psychologist and author, is president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute [www.wbsi.org], an independent, nonprofit organization he helped found in 1958, devoted to research, education, and advanced study in human affairs. Among his current responsibilities, he heads the WBSI’s pioneering International Leadership Forum, an Internet-based think tank composed entirely of influential leaders from business, government, academia, science, journalism, literature, and the arts, addressing the great policy issues of our time. Farson is the author of several critically acclaimed books including Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership, in print in 12 languages, and Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation, written with co-author Ralph Keyes and excerpted in the Harvard Business Review, winning the McKinsey award for the best article published in 2002, the one "most likely to have a major influence on managers worldwide." Reflecting his long interest in design, his newest book is The Power of Design: A Force for the Transformation of Everything, lauded by leadership guru Warren Bennis as a “masterpiece—the one and only book that illuminates the interdependence of design, organization, and leadership.” Farson, twice the president of the International Design Concept at Aspen, has consulted on management and human relations issues with organizations including IBM, Westinghouse, General Dynamics, TRW, Digital Equipment Corporation, Herman Miller Company, Kaypro Corporation, City of San Diego, U.S. Forest Service, Kresge College, University of California Santa Cruz, U.S. Army, and the World Economic Forum.